Peace
by Trogdor19
Summary: After the tragic events of the Season 5 finale, Elena struggles to make peace with her new reality, and what she finds is both less and more than she could have hoped for. Post 5x22, "Home"
1. Peace

_Author's Note: I hated the finale, for some reasons (NOT THE CAMARO, DAMMIT, JULIE, NOT THE CAMARO!) and loved the finale for other reasons (I BROUGHT RIC BACK FIRST, SUCK IT, JULIE!) and I would also like to say that I admire __Mr.__ Somerhalder's acting__ immensel__y.__ But as crazy as the finale was,__ I did not mean to write this story: I was in my car driving across three states__ when the muse attacked__ and it was really dang inconvenient, but thanks to the long-suffering Mr. Trogdor (who very kindly listened to a LOT of TVD talk and took more than his share of driving shifts) we have a story anyway. _

_I wrote this right after the episode, when I thought that __**everyone that came back as a result of the spell came back as human**__, since they showed Tyler being human. That's been corrected in interviews, but I'm going to stick to my original setup._

_Also, I claim no authority on spiritual/religious matters, I just use them as metaphors for the general human condition. Please try to resist burning me at the stake. _

_Sincere angst warning, my already-traumatized readers. Angst with a capital A and a "read at your own risk" skull and crossbones sticker. For that, I apologize. I wanted to write happy Camaro smut but I am my muse's bitch, not the other way around. _

* * *

**Chapter 1: Peace**

"_The candle burns at both ends, it will not last the night. _

_But ah my foes, and oh my friends, it gives a lovely light." _

_-Paraphrase of Edna St. Vincent Millay_

**ELENA**

We buried his car.

Stefan took care of the details: calls and credit cards and heavy equipment rentals. All I did was sit numbly while the crane pulled the Camaro from the wreckage of the Grill and workers gathered every last melted scrap of metal and loaded them onto a flatbed trailer. After that, Matt took my hand and led me to his truck and we drove along behind as if it were a funeral procession, flinching every time a tiny piece blew off the flatbed in the wind, bouncing along the shoulder of the road to disappear into the weeds and grass like so much trash.

I made the backhoe operator wait to dig the grave until I could watch. I wanted to hear its jagged teeth ripping through the roots of trees, brutalizing the soil and leaving a gaping, dark void in the forest behind the boarding house. I wish I could have done it with my own fingers.

Of Damon, there isn't much left: after almost a century and a half, his body is made of magic and little else. After the Traveler's spell stripped that away, all that remained were the bones of a man I never should have met.

I wanted to bury them in the driver's seat of the Camaro, and Stefan never openly argued, but he didn't comply, either. He just took his brother's remains and cremated them, and he went to scatter the ashes alone. I don't know if it was in a place Stefan chose, or somewhere he and Damon talked about who knows how long ago.

This giant grave is Stefan's apology to me for that, but I don't care. Whether it contains ashes, bones, or charred metal, it's still empty. Damon is the kind of gone I couldn't even fathom until now, along with the rest of the magic I took for granted that was holding my whole world together.

Since the spell that brought us back turned us all human again, I can return to Mystic Falls and reclaim our home, though I can't remember why that used to be so important to me. I went back to the boarding house that Damon had to leave in such a hurry and found all of his things still in place. All but one leather jacket hung neatly in a row, his bed made perfectly, one half-empty bottle of bourbon sitting amongst his decanters because his favorite square one must have gotten broken somehow.

I went to his room as if I was returning to him, but instead it was like a museum replica, the colors a little duller, the scents nothing but pale, artificial ghosts of their former selves.

I wonder if we misunderstood the spell, if we turned the Other Side inside out instead of escaping it.

Because my whole _life_ feels like a shadow self. Close enough that you can see what it used to look like, but far enough away that you'll never be able to touch it again.

At this travesty of a gravesite, carefully placed just outside the boundaries of the spell, my friends surround me: Ric and Jeremy, Matt and Tyler, Stefan and Caroline, and even Enzo, though no one invited him. I might as well be alone, for all the comfort they bring me.

Stefan and I can't look at each other, but I feel him wherever I am, like our grief expands from us in waves that shudder with the impact when they intersect.

I blame him. I blame myself, and Markos and Liv and Bonnie. I blame Jeremy and Rebekah and Silas and everyone who has brought us to this day.

Stefan and I stand on opposite sides of the grave as the backhoe crushes blackened steel with the damp soil that will erode it, breeding rust until it is nothing but minerals and fading memories, all part of the blood-soaked foundation of Mystic Falls.

I'm human now. I'll be dead before the last traces of this car are gone.

This should console me, but every breath I'm forced to take lasts a hundred hours, a thousand generations, a million individual explosions of pain. A fragile mortal lifetime isn't nearly short enough.

Once, all I wanted was to be human again, and then I began to want to stay a vampire forever, to watch history expand around Damon and me like a neverending play. And now, all I want to do is die, but I'm the wrong species to find my way back to him that way.

I can still remember when I wanted Damon out of my life for good. And worst of all, I remember one private, shameful moment when I asked God to take anyone, anyone at all, if he would just give me Jeremy back.

Prayers answered at the wrong time turn blessings into curses until I'm afraid to pray anymore.

Maybe it doesn't even matter. Maybe God disappeared along with the Other Side, swept up in that cold, unforgiving wind.

Has it taken Damon yet? Did it hurt him?

I blink, and a man's familiar face fills my vision like a violation.

My numb body jerks back into motion, into life, and I shove Stefan away, the zipper on his jacket scraping my palms as I stagger backwards and pain yanks up through my ankle as it twists on the uneven ground.

He catches me before I complete the fall that would have left me on crutches for weeks. This human body is as weak as I feel. I don't care: I hate it. I want it to suffer, because it took Damon's place so he couldn't get back.

"_Don't touch me_." They're the first words I've spoken since I asked him to bury the Camaro, and even I'm surprised by the disgust that fills each syllable fat and black with hatred.

Stefan flinches, sorrow tunneling ever deeper in his dark green eyes. There's something there that makes my stomach go unsteady and bottomless, and without even thinking, I know what it is. Awareness. Of how long suffering can continue, unremitting. He's already lived longer than I ever will, hurt for longer than I ever have.

He knows what is coming for us.

He doesn't let go of me, and when he speaks each word falls with its own individual gravity, scraping out of him like the sound of pain itself.

"Elena, I will bring him back."

I want to tear Stefan apart, to break my fingernails tearing bloody accusations into his perfectly smooth face. I want to bite him, rip pieces off with my teeth and chew and swallow them, raw and lumpy, into the churning blackness that lives at the center of me. His blood is Damon's blood. I want all of it and it will never be enough.

Caroline's voice is thin and a little unsteady as it breaks through the blaze of hatred that fills my whole mind. "Elena, say something. You're scaring us."

Us. They have an us.

And all I have is this breakable, hateful body that's stuck on the other side of where Damon is.

I nod. "What do I have to do?"

X X X

It takes longer than a day this time. It always does, when Damon's not around to spearhead the plan. Stefan finds a witch on the edge of bankruptcy whose ancestral home is about to be foreclosed upon. She's willing to do a little dark magic as long as the sacrificed person is willing, because foreclosure would mean she loses the ritual groves where her coven has practiced for five generations.

Stefan pays her off and gives her Bonnie's grimoire, with the spell she used to bring back Jeremy. No one is sure if it will work, now that the Other Side has no anchor. No one is entirely sure if there still _is _an Other Side.

I don't tell them that we're living in it.

Three of us volunteer to be the life traded for Damon's, and Caroline is furious at all of us, and keeps stubbornly making therapy appointments no one shows up for. In the end, it is Alaric who will be sacrificed.

"I'm used to it," he tells us. "Besides, I've been back for five weeks and if I stay any longer, I'll have to get a job to pay for my booze."

I don't know if Stefan is as secretly glad as I am that Ric volunteered. I don't want to die: not now that I know what it feels like to exist without existing. To wait for something that never comes.

But it _has _come. Five weeks have passed me by and today is the right cycle of the moon to give the utmost power to the spell.

I wake up at 3 A.M. though we won't do the ritual until afternoon. These days, Stefan's always at Caroline's new apartment near Whitmore, and Jeremy still lives with Matt and Tyler, so it is just me in this cavernous tombstone of a house. I like it, because the slow groans and creaks of its ancient skeleton sound like they are mourning along with me. But this morning, it feels particularly empty because I know by nightfall, it won't be.

When I go to my closet, I really _see_ the clothes there for the first time since I became human again, and I choose carefully, trying on and discarding items until the sun comes up. In the end, I wear an old fire-red Henley because I can remember exactly how Damon's smirk looked when he pinched the front of it to drag me in for a kiss. Over it, I wear one of his jackets, retrieved from his closet down the hall from where I've been sleeping.

I pause in our old bedroom, the first time I've been here since That Day. I close my eyes and try to imagine Damon here with me. In just a few more hours, I will be able to touch him. I can roll across his bed with him and sink into the warm embrace of the water in his bathtub. I can see the glint in his blue eyes when he teases me shamelessly about if I missed him while he was gone. I can hear the rumble of his groan when he starts to climax, his body clamping taut between my thighs.

I open my eyes, and the room is completely silent.

Hope is a language I don't speak anymore and I'm fumbling the pronunciation.

I force my lips into a smile, just to test how it feels, and the dry skin cracks as it stretches. My face sags once more and I lick the droplet of blood from my lips and leave our room behind me.

The car stays precisely at the speed limit for hours as I drive to the grove where we'll do the spell, and I wait there all day. My stomach growls, and eventually, I have to sneak off into the bushes to pee. I hate being human and I can't seem to remember to take care of this body that I'm in.

Everything feels duller now, all my senses blunted except for pain. It's sharper, it takes longer to wane and I feel _everything, _every stub of my toe and throb of a headache, every day that passes without him.

Stefan shows up before all of the others and I'm a little surprised that Caroline's not with him. He doesn't say hello, just sits down quietly by my side. I'm grateful that he doesn't push me and for a moment, I miss the close friends we used to be.

I pull my phone out of my pocket and check the time. Not yet.

The wind riffles through the trees but I can't hear the edges of the leaves scraping together the way I used to be able to, or the different sound when they are blown into the bark of a smaller branch. It all sounds the same now. Boring, and forgettable.

"When we get him back," Stefan asks, "will you stop hating me?"

I can't look at him. I check my phone one more time.

"I never hated you for dying," I eventually offer, because I know that's what he thinks.

"But if I wouldn't have died, Damon _never_ would have ended up on the Other Side," Stefan says, his voice almost aggressive in its urgency. "People have been trying to kill him since we were boys and no one had a chance of taking him down until he decided he was ready. And that was all my fault."

"He could have lived, if he'd wanted," I say, picking up a stick and snapping it viciously because I want to hit Stefan and I won't let myself. Not today, not here. "Damon was always thinking three steps ahead of the rest of us and he knew there was a good chance that the spell to bring you back would fail. He could have compelled a human to strike a match in the Grill, or even just waited for the stove in the kitchen to spark off an explosion." I shred the next stick, splinters jabbing carelessly into my skin. "He could have done his best to save you _and_ lived out his life with me. But instead, he chose to live or die as you lived or died."

Stefan seems to shrink, his head bowing heavily as I erupt with the words that have been filling up all the space inside me for weeks.

"I hate you because he _chose_ you_._"

I feel irritatingly empty once I've said it. I thought it would be a relief to finally throw all of this at Stefan, to let him take all the blame he deserves. But it's weirdly anticlimactic and I sag back against the tree, throwing the torn remnants of my stick. It doesn't go very far.

Stefan starts to speak and then stops himself, shaking his head as his hands rub up and down the legs of his jeans. The clothes fit poorly because of all the weight he's lost, and his cheekbones look sharper now. Caroline says he never remembers to eat if she doesn't cook.

He takes another breath and this time, the words come hard and fast, like they jumped out without his permission.

"You could have stopped him," he says bitterly. "You could have broken his neck and found another way to trigger the explosion. He would have woken up after it was all over, I'd have been alive, and we'd all be together."

I look up now, matching the wounded anger in his eyes with the storm in my own.

"I needed to show him that I loved him the way he truly was, that I supported his decisions. And the ugly truth was that he couldn't live without you, I couldn't live without him, and only one of us could have our way."

I turn away and Stefan doesn't speak again.

It's almost an hour later when Caroline and Ric show up together, and I stand to greet them. The witch, Tara, arrives only a few minutes behind them, carrying Bonnie's grimoire and wearing plain black pants and a '49ers jacket. Her face is plump and round, her skin a smooth dusty color only a shade or two darker than my own, and when she stops in front of us, her kind grey eyes meet mine first.

I wait for her to say hello or ask about the payment we promised, but she just looks at me for a long moment and then kneels down right on the leaves of the forest floor, heedless of the chilly fall wind that blew in with the afternoon hours.

Tara opens the grimoire, the sound of turning pages loud in the space where we all stand, loosely surrounding her.

The witch looks up at Ric and he shifts self-consciously. Even with my useless human nose I can smell the whiskey on him, and I'm sure she can, too.

"Are you certain this is what you want? You need to choose for the right reasons," she says sincerely, and I like her a little better for asking, even though I know she needs the money and there's no way I'll let her leave here without doing the spell.

Ric's lips kick up at one corner. "I'm not sure I've done most of the things in my life for the right reasons."

A weight drags at my chest as I suddenly realize this is the last time I'll see him. I should have visited Ric more, in the weeks leading up to this. I just didn't know how to spend time with him, because I never have anything to say anymore.

I reach out and take his hand and it takes him a moment to squeeze back, he looks so surprised that I've touched him.

"But you've usually done the right thing anyway," I remind him, and swallow. "Ric, you don't have to do this," I say, and it hurts to get the words out because I really mean it. We have to do the spell, somehow, with someone. But it doesn't have to be _Ric._

"This is what I want, Elena," he says gently, and squeezes my hand. "Don't worry. I'm a pro at dying."

Tara smiles, because we told her his whole weird history, and then she laughs lightly and Caroline joins in, her voice too high-pitched in a way that makes me feel jittery.

The witch starts to chant. She does it quietly, unlike Bonnie used to, and the wind picks up so slowly that I don't even notice it's changed until it whips my hair across my face.

I gasp, my body coming alive in a rush like I just transitioned all over again. I can feel my skin rubbing against the fabric of my clothes and the muscles in my legs and back, stiff from sitting in the woods all day. My heart pounds heedlessly against my ribs like it used to every time I saw Damon and I wonder if his spirit is here already, if he's watching.

This time, I really believe he might be.

I turn to Stefan, my eyes wide, and his are so intensely, cuttingly green they almost hurt. He smiles with pure exhilaration so he must feel it too, this must be real. Damon is here.

The witch reaches out without opening her eyes and Ric squeezes my hand once with a reassuring smile and then steps forward, letting me go and reaching for the witch's soft fingers instead.

She grasps him and the colors of his body start to fade, his shape going vague. Unexpected tears sting my eyes and my lips form Ric's name but no sound comes out.

Caroline stifles a cry and hugs her arms nervously around her body. Stefan moves behind her and wraps her up, holding her so tightly that I'm not sure if he's comforting her, or himself.

And then the wind stops.

Tara's gray eyes pop open, her lips pressing together slightly. She lets go of Ric's hand and he's abruptly as real-looking as I am, his hair messy from the wind and one corner of his collar flipped the wrong way.

He glances at the ground, then at me, and frowns when he sees that my eyes still focus on him.

"Is it…done?" he asks.

"Your friend isn't there," Tara says, and closes the grimoire.

My empty stomach clenches like a jagged fist, acid climbing up my throat as my heart seems to stutter, the beats throbbing like a new bruise.

"Does that mean he was…swept away?" Stefan asks immediately. "Like the others?"

"Or did the Other Side disappear with Bonnie?" Caroline asks. Stefan's arms fall away from her as he takes a stiff step to the side, like he can't stand to touch her, or anyone, in this moment.

Tara pushes back up to her feet and brushes a stray leaf off the grimoire.

"The Other Side was created by a spell," she explains gently. "When the Travelers overwhelmed it, as you told me, it nullified one of the central assumptions of the spell. From there, the rest would have slowly unraveled. The wind you spoke of is one side effect. The loss of the anchor is part of the process as well, but not the end of it. The Other Side is still there. For how much longer I can't say, as it's shrinking all the time." She presses the grimoire into her chest, her knuckles squeezing the edges. "But I got a good lock on your friend's energy signature from the objects you gave me and I can tell you for certain that he's not on the Other Side."

"Well, he was a vampire and he died!" Caroline exclaims. "Where else could he go?"

"Not everyone supernatural stays on the Other Side," Tara explains, tucking locks of her short dark hair away from her face. "Some move through to…"

"Hell?" I supply, my tone so raw I almost don't recognize it.

She winces. "My coven has other names for it. We don't believe it's quite the same thing. But yes. When the Other Side started to unravel, people went instead to where they would have ended up eventually."

"So all supernatural creatures go automatically to hell?" Caroline says, her mouth falling open a little. "Or only if you've killed someone? What about witches? What about werewolves who don't trigger the curse?"

Tara holds up a hand. "Wait, wait, I didn't mean that everyone is damned. Some people pass on as well, to a place of rest. But you can't go there automatically, because acceptance is necessary for grace."

"What is that supposed to mean?" Ric asks sharply.

"It means that if you cannot forgive yourself, God doesn't have the power to grant you absolution," she says kindly, her eyes steady on his until he glances away, rubbing the back of his neck.

"So how…" I have to stop and swallow several times. I can't unravel, not right now. I have to keep standing and speaking until this witch tells me what I need to know. "How do we know which place Damon went to?"

Stefan pales at the sound of his brother's name. Caroline takes his hand and this time, he doesn't resist.

"One of our coven can speak with the dead, so I've had some experience with this," the witch explains. "There's a fairly predictable pattern, actually, though the crumbling of the Other Side is denying people the time some of them need to come terms with themselves. Supernatural creatures have more regrets than most."

Tara hands Ric the grimoire, and slides her hands into her jacket pockets.

"Can you tell me how your friend died? Was it a good death, something he might have chosen, or was it something that would breed resentment, dissatisfaction or guilt?"

I want to scream at her that it doesn't matter, but I force myself to think about it the way Damon would have. He saved his little brother and his best friend and defended his hometown from those who would have invaded it. During his last moment, he was holding my hand, knowing that I was with him, no matter what. He died with absolutely unflinching courage, his foot stomping down on the gas pedal even as a bullet hole blossomed in his chest.

Stefan says it for me. "It was a good death. Exactly…" he falters, and coughs once before he can continue. "It was the one he would have wanted."

"I think he would have rather had Klaus as the bullseye in the middle of his target," Ric mutters, "but yeah."

Tara nods, her eyes sympathetic. "And what about the major relationships in his life? Was there a fight, a promise un-kept? Did he have anything to come back for?"

"Us!" I scream it, the word howling up through the trees. "He was supposed to come back for _us_."

The lines at the edges of Tara's eyes deepen but she doesn't take a step back, though she looks a little like she wants to. "Honey, no one gets to die at exactly the same time as everyone they care about," she says, very softly. "If you are loved, and you know it, that's as much as any of us can ask for."

Caroline darts an uneasy glance at me, and Stefan closes his eyes. I can see tears shining in his lashes as he fights to keep his face composed. Ric coughs, looks back toward where we parked the cars, then coughs again, scrubbing the heel of his hand across his face like he has an itch.

"I think your friend has found his rest," Tara tells us all. "And that's a kinder fate than he could ever hope for if he kept on living in this crazy world of ours." She nods once, and steps back. "I am truly sorry for your loss."

I fall to my knees, but the pain of the twigs breaking beneath the weight of my bones isn't nearly enough.

He is at peace, but there will be none for me.

* * *

_Author's Note: So sorry, dear readers! Feel free to vent, scream, and otherwise fill the review box below with bitter tears after that ending. No weapons, if you please…and if you must bring them along, make sure they're sharp and creatively shaped ;)_

_We have two chapters today folks, because I'm not quite mean enough to end on that note. But first, I have to thank two very talented ladies for their support and input on this story:_

_Goldnox, who I would rightfully hate for her overwhelming amount of pure creative talent, if it weren't for the fact that she's an incredibly hardworking beta, painfully funny, and a steadfast friend to me on my best days as well as my worst. I forgive you for being so awesome; I know you can't help yourself. _

_If you'd like to read some of the most addictive New Adult style AH romance out there, try her new story "Order Up" and just SEE if you can resist falling for her young, sweet Damon (just try, I dare you. Betcha last less than three paragraphs)._

_And to mrsl488, for lending her well-practiced analytical eye to this fic. If you're looking for what to read next over the long, lonely hiatus, try her new book review blog readsandreviews dot com. She does easy to read, well-balanced reviews and has down to earth taste in books that is a good match for what most of us here on the site are looking for, so her blog is like a free service that keeps you from having to ever read mediocre books- just read whatever she recommends and you'll never go wrong. Also, she just did a review of one of my favorite books of all time, "Sea of Tranquility" by Katja Millay, so go check that out. _


	2. Grace

_Author's Note: This chapter was a really hard one to write. How do you encapsulate a whole life in one chapter and make it meaningful, after all? Without the support of some incredible beta readers, this might have sunk into the no-man's-land of the never posted, so for this chapter I thank Goldnox, who is an incredible support to me, and loves me even when I make her cry, and mrsl488, who had the guts to tell me all the parts she hated so that the final version shines much more clearly than the original. _

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**Chapter 2: Grace**

_"And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should._

_Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be._

_With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world."_

_-Selected lines from the Desiderata, attributed to Max Ehrmann_

**ELENA**

"If you cram one more thing into this house, there's not going to be enough room left for me," Damon drawls.

I open my eyes to find him perched on my windowsill, his motorcycle boot kicked up against the far side to brace himself and one of my tiny stained-glass and metal butterflies balanced precariously on his nose.

I shoot out of bed and across the room, snatching the butterfly from him and pushing my sleep-tangled hair back over my shoulders. "Careful, you're going to break it!"

He swings his feet down and tugs me into the space he left in between his boots. His eyes flare with amused satisfaction as he ducks his head and kisses the tip of my nose. "Sweetheart, I got exactly what I was after, and it wasn't a broken dust-catcher But it's good to see that you're as adorably gullible as ever."

I quickly wriggle away from his flirting hands, embarrassed that he caught me looking so sloppy, and gather my hair up into a ponytail. It's more shades of silver than brown these days, but it's as soft as it ever was and I like the feel of it on my back too much to cut it like most women my age.

"Can you stay long?" I ask, fastening my hair with a SmartBand that immediately molds itself to the diameter of my ponytail, holding the strands in a soft but secure grip. "If you give me just five minutes, I could hop in the shower..."

Damon waits until I'm finished with my hair and then catches my hand and spins me into his arms, leaving my back cuddled to his chest and his arms locked around my waist. I squirm a little, because this position always reminds me that my body has changed and his hasn't, but I soften when he nuzzles his face into the crook of my neck.

"Are you kidding? I love the way you smell when you're still warm from bed. It's all sleepy and flannel-y with a little of that fabric softener with the weird dancing teddy bear on the bottles."

I laugh. "That's only your favorite because you've never seen a whole display of them in the grocery store. It's enough to give me motion sickness. I wish Florida would outlaw GIF labels like California did."

"He's got way too much hip action for a bear," Damon agrees. "But it smells fucking fantastic."

I don't know why he never seems surprised by the things that have changed in the world when he appears to me: if his ghost goes places that I'm not, or if he's a figment of my imagination so he's always caught up on everything I'd know, including the animated labels of name-brand fabric softener. In my most secret thoughts, I believe he's something more than both those things: that he's purely himself, visiting this world he's not tied to anymore but not bound to haunt it when he's not with me.

I push the speculation away. It doesn't matter how. I accept, and with acceptance, comes grace.

Right now, this little visit with the love of my life is my grace.

Damon turns me to face the French doors to the garden, dropping his chin onto my shoulder so I can feel the gentle scratch of his stubble on the skin just inside the edge of my long-sleeved tee shirt.

"There are a lot of them this morning," he murmurs. "Must be a rush sale on the flower crack. Junkies trampling each other in the streets for their fix."

The low angle of the rising sun is just right to shine through the delicate wings of the butterflies as they cruise down into my garden, colors flashing brightly while they swoop and flap and maneuver for the best landing position.

"I chose all the plants in the garden just to attract them," I admit quietly.

I don't recall ever telling Damon when I started to harbor a special fondness for butterflies, but he knew. Even before I started to collect photographs and holograms and tiny statuettes of them, he would point them out whenever he was visiting if we were outside, as if he couldn't stand for me to miss a single moment of something beautiful.

We watch the butterflies quietly for a while, his fingers weaving together with mine, our arms wrapped securely around my body. I take a deep breath, my muscles relaxing more than they usually ever do, and a scent catches my notice.

"Did you make coffee?"

He makes a disgusted noise. "I went three rounds with your goddamn electronics is what I did. And yes, before you insult my masculinity by asking, I won."

"I don't understand why you hate my coffee pot so much," I grumble. "It's perfect: it filters the water, grinds the beans just the right coarseness so they're not bitter, and measures the exact amount of grounds."

"First," Damon says patiently, "R2D2 over there makes girl coffee. You can see right through it like cheap lingerie. And second, I don't like shit telling me what to do. Especially mechanical shit."

I laugh and shiver in pleasure as he scoops my ponytail back over his shoulder, massaging my scalp with blunt fingertips and no regard at all for how he's messing up the smooth arrangement of strands. I can feel the SmartBand tightening and loosening as it tries to account for the movement of his fingers without pulling my hair.

"You can see through expensive lingerie, too, Damon," I remind him, unable to keep a little breathiness out of my voice at the risqué topic.

He laughs, rough and low, and goosebumps break out all over my body, prickling beneath my loose pajama pants and top. "If it's good enough," Damon purrs, "it's off before you decide if you can see through it or not."

"Coffee," I squeak breathlessly, pulling away. Whenever things turn too intimate, I wake up, as if my mind refuses to allow me to go that far in my dreams. If I keep it PG-13, sometimes he sticks around longer.

But when I turn around, all the teasing is gone from his voice and I can see the ache of pain in his beautiful eyes. Tears leap to mine in response, because I know what that means.

"Sorry, baby," he murmurs, the endearment almost soundless. "I can't stay, this time. Soon, okay?"

He's already starting to fade, just the way Ric started to on that long-ago day when we so selfishly tried to bring Damon back.

I jump forward, reaching for his hand and he catches mine and grips it so tightly it hurts. It's the only time he forgets his own supernatural strength, in these last moments when he has to leave me again.

But even as I think it, his hold loosens and he lets the texture of his palm smooth slowly, so slowly, across mine. At the last minute before our skin parts, he catches my hand and flips it over, bowing in a graceful movement that was lost to history far before the twentieth century, much less the twenty-first. I feel his lips press softly against my knuckles and I close my eyes so I don't have to watch him disappear.

I wake up.

I sit up too quickly, my back protesting with a pop and a twinge of pain as I look around wildly. The curtains are still drawn across the French doors and the sun hasn't come up yet. The tiny metal and stained-glass butterfly still rests on the sill of my window and I dig both hands into my graying hair and tilt my head back with a groan, blinking rapidly up at the ceiling until I have the tears mostly under control.

I won't cry, won't taint the sweetness of these rare dream visits with sadness, or with regret that they don't last longer.

It is what it is, and I accept that. I slide out of bed, moving gingerly until I'm sure my hip is going to take my weight without protest, and then I turn back and make the bed with swift, thoughtless movements. It's still a little before sunrise, so I have to flick on a lamp to find my way to the kitchen of our small cottage. The coffee maker is set to start in another ten minutes, but I can't stop myself from checking to see if it has been adjusted to use more grounds to make the rich, flavorful coffee that Damon always preferred.

It hasn't.

I knew it would be that way, so my hands only falter a little as I set out my travel mug and go to get dressed for my morning walk. It's a mile and a half, like it has been for years now, but it's been taking me a little bit longer to complete it lately, so it might be a good thing that my dream woke me up before my alarm.

They never feel like ordinary dreams. The first time he appeared to me was a week after his death, and I couldn't stop crying, so he didn't stay long. That seems to upset him, and so I've learned to hold back, though it was almost impossible in the early days.

I'm still embarrassed at the memory, but after Tara's failed spell, I forced Jeremy to sleep in my room on a cot to be sure that it wasn't Damon's ghost that was appearing to me. I figured if he was a ghost, he couldn't have passed on like the witch had told us, and I could find some other spell, some sacrifice to bring him back.

But after three weeks and five lucid dreams of Damon, my brother packed up his cot, hugged me, and explained with sad brown eyes that he was sorry, but it wasn't a ghost.

I never told Jeremy at the time how much that news wrecked me. And I never told him in the years afterward how much it comforted me.

I swap my pajamas for yoga pants and a loose tee shirt, sitting down to tie on my athletic shoes before I grip the sturdy shelves that Stefan installed, and pull myself back to standing. My bad hip doesn't slow me down much, but if I'm not careful when I'm standing up or sitting down, I tweak it the wrong way and the pain is breathtaking.

When I emerge from my bedroom, the light is on in the kitchen. My roommate, Dani, must have a good book going if she got up to finish it before work.

Sure enough, she's chewing on a thumbnail, her eyes glued to the gently glowing screen of her e-reader. She's taller than me and uncompromisingly thin, her sharp, elven features set off by her short, steel-grey hair. Her slimly muscled shoulders are buried in a hooded sweatshirt that says "Carpenters do it on the level."

I duck my head and walk by her without glancing over. "Morning," I say quickly as I busy myself with the coffee pot.

She clucks her tongue knowingly, a laugh riding under her voice when she says, "Crazy sex dreams about your old flame again, huh?"

An itchy red heat creeps up my neck but I refuse to respond.

Dani groans. "God, what I wouldn't give to hijack a direct line into your dreams. They sound so much nicer than real dating."

I laugh and slide into the seat next to her at the table, comforted by her familiar voice and not quite ready to be alone with my own thoughts this morning. "Face it, you've never liked dating. What you really want is a gigolo that you can kick out when you're done with him so you can go back to your book, guilt-free."

"And what's wrong with that?" she sputters. "I've been playing charming and coy for men ever since I hit puberty, laughing at stupid jokes and pretending not to hear them pass gas and I'm ready to drop the nonsense. I think a classy, upstanding pool of gigolos would be a freaking public service!"

I bite my lip to hold back my laughter, my eyes dancing. "I'm not sure charming and _coy_ are what you've been exactly, but I see your point."

When I met Dani, we were thirty-something college students in a university where barely anyone else was even old enough to drink. She was the oldest drama major in the place and not about to take any shit over it, and I was on my third try at higher education, tentatively working toward my teaching certificate and hoping that this time, I had made the right decision.

We first ran into each other at a networking function where Dani had taken all of the rock hard "refreshment" cookies and built them into a shockingly realistic replica of a blowfish. She was just finishing the fins when she saw me, grabbed my hand and said, "Good God, another adult. Tell me you're not faculty and that you have a flask."

We moved in together by the end of the semester and we've been roommates ever since, except for two brief stints when Dani got married and subsequently divorced.

"What are you still doing here?" Dani asks, her eyes already migrating back to her book. "Go work out and be virtuous and all that jazz. Keep up our reputation so we don't look like a couple of lazy old cat ladies."

I smile and push back my chair. "Easy for you to say, since you could eat chocolate cake slathered with peanut butter for breakfast and never gain an ounce. And we don't own cats, so I think we're safe."

She reaches for her tea. "Yeah, but Square-Jaw-and-Tight-Levis down the street has a box of stray kittens he's trying to unload, and I think if anything could turn me cat lady, that might."

"Are they black?" I ask wistfully. I'm firmly anti-pet—they always die too fast—but I've always had a soft spot for black kittens.

Dani snaps off the tag to her tea bag and flicks it so it hits me square in the nose. "The man, for Christ's sake, Gilbert. I was talking about the _man_."

When I linger, still not getting up to head for the door, she gives me a sidelong look. "Speaking of men that rock the hell out of the graying-temple thing, I noticed you got your airport suitcase down off the top shelf. You headed to see your brother?"

I narrow my eyes.

Dani just grins and bats her eyelashes. "Third time's the charm, and you know I've been saving my lucky third divorce for Jeremy."

"If it's that lucky, you don't _get_ a divorce," I remind her. "And he's only been single again for two years. Not nearly long enough." She pretends to pout and I change the subject. "Anyway, the suitcase is to visit Stefan and Caroline. Their second daughter is graduating from med school next weekend and I'm flying up for the ceremony."

Dani sips her tea, her book screen turning itself off to save power. "I thought you said they called with _bad_ news last week?"

I sigh, playing with the lid of my travel mug. "That was their youngest. He's back in rehab again. Started to spiral right around the time we heard that Celia was going to graduate with honors."

"Hell, what is that, his second stay or his third?" Dani shakes her head. "And a daughter through med school already, with as late as they started... _Please_ tell me Caroline's finally sprouted a wrinkle?"

I take a casual drink of coffee. "I told you, they're plastic surgery junkies. Any wrinkle they thought of having was ironed out long ago."

"Vain." She snorts in disgust. "Is that why they adopted all their kids? All the fat ankles and stretch marks were too gauche for Little Miss Perfect?"

I swat at her arm, giving her a reproving look. "Be nice." I still get a sympathetic twinge when I think of how much Caroline wanted biological children, even though otherwise she has seemed perfectly happy as a vampire.

I steady myself on the table as I stand, checking the time. I've talked too long, which means I'll have to walk a shorter loop today.

"I've got a newbie on the wrong end of the hammer today," Dani informs me over the rim of her coffee mug. "And training them means I'll be late getting home, so don't feel bad about starting poker without me."

"No problem," I assure her. Ric's widow lives two doors down and she normally comes over early to help me make snacks for our ladies' poker night anyway.

I turn toward the door, and the scrape of a chair is my only warning before Dani attacks, ducking around in front of me and catching me in a hug. I can tell she's worried, because you can usually measure her concern in pounds per square inch during one of her ferocious embraces and right now she's redlining into bruised-kidney territory.

"You know, if the dreams get too hard, you can take one of my nighty night pills. Leave you sleeping like a fratboy at six A.M. on New Years Day," she promises, trying to keep her voice light.

"I love the dreams, you know that," I tell her, letting my chin rest just for a second on her shoulder, the bright cucumber and sage scent of her hair starting to soothe the little twist of loneliness that's followed me ever since I crawled out of bed this morning. "But I love my life, too. I'm okay, Dani," I promise my best friend.

"Okay..." she agrees reluctantly, pulling away and giving me a pointed look. "But if you didn't feel up to exercising this morning and you want to stay here with me and read trashy novels and eat ice cream and cinnamon toast, it'd be our little secret, that's all I'm saying."

I smile warmly at her, and then take my coffee and head for the door. I'm more than okay, I'm _lucky _and I know it. I got an incredible romance with the love of my life, and I got a companion to share my days with, someone to laugh with me and cry with me and bring home eggs when I forget to go to the store. So what if that turned out to mean two different people instead of just one?

I push through our front door and remember to use the railing to ease my way down the few steps to the sidewalk, skirting the colorful burst of the flowers I planted and smiling at the burble of the fountain Dani built behind them. Even after all this time, it gives me a little thrill to see a place in the world that belongs to me, where I feel at home again.

After Damon died, I dropped out of Whitmore and fled the country. I stayed gone for years, but I wasn't really traveling because there was anything I wanted to see. I just needed a distraction, so I wandered from place to place like I was waiting to happen upon a sign that said, "This. This is something worth living for" so that I could lift my eyes to whatever was behind the sign and I would know that it was okay to stop moving again.

That never happened.

I saw a lot of places, and I don't even remember most of them. I found out that there's nothing lonelier than sobbing into a stale hotel pillow in a city where no one knows you and no one cares what has moved you to tears. But there's also a strange kind of hope that takes root in you when a stranger goes out of their way to help you find your way, just because they feel like it.

One day, I was sitting in a café in Paris, eating a crepe, and I smiled at the waitress who had served me the day before. She smiled back politely, in that way people have when they obviously don't remember you, and I realized I was living just like the ghosts that Jeremy used to see on the Other Side. Drifting along beside people living their lives, but without lives of their own. Unnoticed and insignificant.

I hadn't found peace, but I wasn't really alive either.

After that, I went back to my hotel, which at that point was just a dingy hostel bunk in the common dorm, and I sat and thought about everything. About how angry I was at Stefan and how after seven long years, it still wrenched my whole body with pure _want_ when I thought of Damon.

I knew that if I was going to have any chance at seeing Damon again, I would have to live my life the right way so that when I died, I could find peace alongside him.

That witch, Tara, had said that the key was acceptance, but I hadn't accepted a thing. I'd been rejecting everything that happened with every ounce of my energy. Raging against it, denying it, trying to push it down so I could forget even for a single second how much I wished it had never taken place. It was what I did when I found out the world held vampires and werewolves alongside humans. It's what I did when I became one.

So in that hostel, with laughing young backpackers coming and going in twos and threes in a room where I sat in the corner like a discarded piece of luggage, I let myself truly believe that Damon was gone for good.

I began to cry, so loud and long that it felt like something in me might rupture under the strain, and one of the boys in the room turned back and left his friends to come and sit beside me. He found me some rough paper towels to blow my nose on, and later that afternoon, he brought me a sandwich. In the morning, he went with me to buy my plane ticket back to America and I never saw him again.

I turn down the next street on my walking route, thinking of those first strange days when I came back, but still had no home. Jeremy had just finished college and was living in a tiny studio apartment in New York City, before he ever got his first art show. Stefan and Caroline were married, and he'd had her turn him back into a vampire after a few years of living as a human. It was just too stressful for both of them, knowing he could be killed at any moment.

He'd found a way to undo the spell on Mystic Falls, but he and Caroline had settled down in a cottage on the coast of Maine instead of going back to the boarding house and I stayed there with them for a little while, trying to get my bearings.

I decided I wanted to help other people whose lives had gotten too hard for them, so I started my degree in psychology. By then, I'd used all my college money traveling, so I had to work my way through school and I was deep into my master's internship and crying every night before Caroline finally showed up at my apartment and sat me down for an intervention.

"You're a terrible counselor," she told me without preamble, and I burst into tears. "You feel everyone's pain like it is your own, and it doesn't help anyone for you to destroy yourself like this. You need to get out while you still can."

Two weeks later I quit school, totally deflated at being nearly thirty years old with no clear purpose in life and I just wanted to give up, to die right then even if it meant I'd never see Damon again because I was just so damned tired.

It was then that I had my first dream visit from him since before I left the States, and he teased me mercilessly about not knowing "what I was gonna be when I grew up" and then tickled me until I was thrashing and shrieking with laughter, and I woke up grinning.

From there, things weirdly got better. Quitting school with no degree and five years worth of debt to work off was so embarrassing that for the first time, I didn't feel like I had to live up to anyone's expectations. I accepted that I was already at the bottom and I think it was then that I started to actually just be myself.

I got a job waiting tables at this quirky restaurant in Greenwich and the staff was all insane: constantly teasing and flirting and playing elaborate pranks on each other, and I had a blast. At my second job, I was a nanny, and I loved it. The kids really responded to me and I adored showing them new things, watching them start to grasp the way the world worked. Stefan and Caroline had already adopted their first child and they had been gently nudging me to have children of my own, but I didn't want a family that didn't include Damon.

It took me a full year to work up the courage to go back to school and get my teaching certificate so I could work with kids, and once I met Dani, college finally became fun in the way I had hoped for way back when I started Whitmore. She wanted to work on art department crews, building sets for feature films, but she got a lead on a job at one of the major television studios down in Jacksonville right after graduation.

Ric and his new wife—ironically named Isabelle, though she was as different from my biological mother as anyone could be—lived there, too, so I followed Dani when she got the job. We got a little house in Jacksonville and I started teaching kindergarten in the same school I still work for today.

It took a while to convince everyone that Dani and I weren't secretly a couple, but it was an arrangement that worked for us, and every year that I relaxed a little more into my new reality, Damon would come more often to my dreams.

I sigh lightly as I think about him, trailing my fingers over the white blossoms of a waist-high hedge that borders the sidewalk.

I've never managed to be grateful that he died, but there's a strange easing deep in my body when I think that it was in my lifetime that he finally found peace. I'm glad that he didn't have to suffer through any more rounds of torture with old enemies and huge fallouts with his brother and I'm so incredibly thankful that I had any small part in making him happy. And as queasily guilty as it makes me, I'm even glad for the spell that brought me back as a human after Damon and I died in the explosion at the Grill.

I never could have taught kindergarten as a vampire, not with as volatile as I used to be. I couldn't have put down the kind of roots that I have with my friends here in Jacksonville. Caroline and Stefan have each other, and they have their kids—all of whom are compelled not to share their secret—but they still have to move all the time. They can never settle anywhere, never truly make a home and that's something I don't think I could live without.

And I can't imagine never having met Dani, though sometimes it makes me smile to think of the sparks she and Damon would have struck off of each other. They'd have bickered as badly as he and Caroline did, if not worse.

There's not a doubt in my mind that when I die, I will find myself at Damon's side, with him smirking and making a dirty joke, probably. But that's not the only life I have to look forward to anymore.

I turn the corner back towards home so I will have a chance for a quick shower and a yogurt before work, though I suspect I'll be running a little late, as always.

I often think about the witch, Tara, and what a difference her simple words made to me. And sometimes I think about what I would say to myself if I could go back to that afternoon in the woods when I felt like there was nothing left in the world for me.

It wouldn't have been, "I'm sorry." Or even, "You'll see him again." Instead, I would have just passed on a simple promise.

There is life after death, but you have to open your eyes to see it.

* * *

_Author's Note: Thanks for sticking with me, dear readers. I expect we'll see Damon alive and well on our screens soon enough in Season 6, but had some things I wanted to say about death and grieving and fate before he was resurrected, so thank you for supporting me in telling the story that was in my heart at the time, however bittersweet. _

_If you are still itching for a Damon who is alive and well and flirting like a madman with Elena, try my Season 5 rewrite, "In Time We Trust."_

_And if you liked my writing in this story, please hop on over to Amazon and search "Forsworn Michelle Hazen" to check out a free sample of my post-apocalyptic original fiction novel. In a chapter and a half you get a hot, good-natured prince, a cagey and sword-happy female assassin, and a heck of a naked fight scene. The book is competing in the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest right now, and every review of my free sample takes me a step further toward winning a publishing contract and starting the career of my dreams, so feed a fellow writer and please click on over to Amazon __to__ check it out and leave me a review! _


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